Bio:

Hassani comes from a family who’ve spent several generations working in a moderately sized asteroid mining site ‘close’ to and supported by business interests on the planet Uman VI. It’s one of a cluster of similar sites working to extract various substances (primarily rare-earth metals). The laissez-faire economic policies of the government led to escalating tensions between the miners and the business interests supporting them, with the grey-area of the planetary citizenship of the miners and the dependencies of most kinds of space based settlement allowing the exploitation of the miners beyond what most would consider to be a reasonable level.

Matters came to a head while Hassani was in his late 20’s. The first major mining strike met with little in the way of negotiations but much in the way of sanctions and threats to the delicate supply chain to the colony. This was enough to push the various ming colonies in the ‘local area’ to stop viewing each other as competition and begin to work together to put pressure on their corporate overseers to treat them and their families fairly. Hassani was instrumental in the new unionisation discovering a passion for representing and guiding his fellow workers. Over a decade on and he’s the head of the Umani Miners and Prospectors Union and Co-operative (UMPUC), working to represent the interests of all of the mining stations in the area.

With the greater rights and legal protections won for them the union is fast becoming a significant political force on Uman as being the source of large quantities of local metals that cannot easily be extracted on the planets surface gives the union considerable leverage. The mining stations are still highly dependent on planetary resources, but at least they cannot be held to ransom quite so easily any more. The union is looking to further reduce its dependence on Uman and to expand membership/affiliation to other ‘oppressed/taken advantage of’ asteroid mining workers in the wider galaxy- at least as much as is possible with common communications and transport technology. Realistically they are willing to merely spread ideas and provide experienced… consultants to other groups of workers that they feel need help.

Hassani would like to be more of a family man, but his responsibilities and the pressures of mining-colony living make that easier said than done. He has a wife, two daughters and a son- none of which he gets to spend as much time with as he’d like. His mother and one brother are still alive, but his other siblings and older relatives either died as a direct result of the suppression of the strikes they were a part of, or else due to health problems that resulted from the borderline blockades used to combat the striking miners. This is a significant reason behind his antipathy for the companies of Uman and the elements of the government who he feels fail to control them. Some of his political rivals say that he has gone too far in the past to protect his own, but he has never successfully been linked to a series fortunate accidents that afflicted convenient rivals in the past. He would like to be thought of as a man of principle, but with the right buttons pushed that could all go out of the window.